With advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking, and communication technologies, an increasing number of devices, in particular, digital computing devices, are being interconnected to solve government and business problems to increase efficiency and reduce cost. However, the application of advanced information technology (IT) is often blocked or made difficult by the existence of legacy data, maintained in various incompatible data sources and data formats. Migration and consolidation of the data into a common repository with common data format often become an essential pre-requisite. But, in many governmental and business problems, the volume of data, data sources and data format are so overwhelming, it is virtually impossible to address the problem manually or in a piecewise effort.
Improving the efficiency and possibly reducing the cost for the provision of medical services is a good example. The problem has been substantially under attended to for so long, there are massive volumes of physician, patient and other medical service related demographic data residing in a plethora of heterogeneous databases of incompatible data formats. Consolidating these demographic data into a common demographic data repository with common data formats is for all practical purposes essential for any provider and medical services related organization to attempt to apply advanced information technology (IT) to improve the efficiency and possibly reduce the cost for the provision of medical services.